Rectitude
by i was a controversy
Summary: Elphaba ponders good deeds, and how passive acceptance of injustice may be the greatest wickedness of all. Fiyeraba, if ya care. :)


**Rectitude**

**Summary:**

**Elphaba ponders good deeds, and how passive acceptance of injustice may be the greatest wickedness of all. Fiyeraba, if ya care. :)**

**001. **

I don't know how righteous I was in actuality; I think I was just smart.

It's never been easy—being green. It's never been easy to live with my few excruciating realities—my father and his hatred, my mother and her ghost, my sister and her percipience and her poorly masked resentment of my very being.

The thought of acceptance has always served as warm, sweet tantalization for me, despite the fact—and it is a fact—that acceptance by the multitude will never pervade any of my excruciating realities; it will never be even a portion of my reality. Ultimate acceptance is just not possible; I'm _green_.

I knew that, even then. But I was so unflinchingly hopeful; I _let _myself be ignorant because I _wanted _to be. I wanted to believe in the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I wanted to believe that I could be accepted—even adored—by the populace. I wanted to believe it was genuine; I wanted to believe it was everything I'd ever wanted—and it was. I _wanted _it. I _wanted _it so badly. I wanted so much.

But I did have infuriatingly acute self-awareness, and I knew I wanted it too badly.

If I agreed—if I caved—my flimsy layer of rectitude, my seemingly stringent ethics, my cause—what I'd always believed in and insisted on fighting for with that signature intransigence that had begun to define me—would vanish, without even putting up a fight. I knew that with a snap of that lowly old man's undeniably _not _magical fingers, the righteous Elphaba Thropp would cease to exist. I knew because I was smart, not because I was strong. Not because I was brave. Not because I was good.

I was weak, and no stranger to submission, and yes, I understood right from wrong, but I could envision myself choosing wrong in an instant if I only heard the word _acceptance_.

Thankfully for my cause, I was too intelligent to give in. I chose right, and somehow I became a symbol of depravity, while simultaneously embarking on a journey wrought with a plethora of _good deeds._

I call those good deeds calamities, nowadays.

**002. **

My little Nessa always hated herself too much to accomplish anything good.

I think, in analyzing her now, that she was too caught up in her own faults to allow herself much worry for the rest of the world's. I don't doubt that she noticed the injustices of the world. I think she probably blocked them out, reasoning that if she were unable to correct herself—perfect herself—she would never be able to do anything good for the world around her. Self-maintenance first—self-health. Then worry about everybody else's problems.

It's such a rational argument.

I don't know how righteous it is.

Unlike Nessa, I was always expected to fail. I suppose I tried to mend the tears and the cracks and the injustices around me because I figured I was futile in and of myself. I'm…_green. _

But Nessa could have been something, and she knew it. She was thoughtful, and wickedly clever. She had a good heart, though it was beating so faintly, by the end, that the insidious voices in her head drowned out its steady tempo. And she was gorgeous—beautiful like our mother, allegedly. I think she was more beautiful than Glinda ever was.

People thought it a shame.

The populace looked at my sister with a pity almost contemptible; they gave her no ounce of consideration and by proxy she gave herself not one tiny fragment of credit. They made her hate herself.

They made her wicked.

For if one cannot do good for oneself—if one cannot _be _good oneself—how can they do anything good for others?

She _hated _herself. She _needed _someone to let her know that she was something—something worthy of being loved.

That's why, you see—I had to do it. I had to enchant the shoes, as soon as it registered as remotely feasible. I had to let her know that she was worth something; I had to boost her up so she'd stop tearing herself and others down.

I thought I was making good.

I've become too pragmatic to insist on bearing all the guilt of my sister's downfall. I've accepted the fact that that particular night—that situation—quickly spiraled into a fiasco that I was unable to control.

It was quite like the twister, actually.

But I could have saved Nessa.

I could have saved her.

I literally gifted her with the first step to her freedom. She could have recovered. She could have redeemed herself. She was so young; she was twenty years old—I could have saved my Nessie; she could have made good.

I wonder what her life was for.

I feel as though I've left someone or something bereft; I feel as though I wasted something. First I tangled her legs. Then I barely allowed her to live, and then I let her die.

And what demented kind of rectitude is that?

**003. **

It was always about me, not the Animals.

I mean, yes, it was about the Animals, because justice is justice and I do, undoubtedly, have a good sense of justice. And injustice.

But Dr. Dillamond was _me. _

My father was a grave, trepidatious creature following my mother's death. He regarded me with ignominy, on bad days, and held me at a distance on stellar ones. As for Nessa, she reminded him of my mother, I think, and he was all too paranoid, so he locked her up like a princess in a tower. Neither of us ever really saw any light.

On the rare instances when the sunlight was allowed to illuminate me and my abominable verdigris, when I was exposed to the scorching public of the ever-conservative Colwen Grounds, my seclusion was quickly replaced by opprobrium. That routine is what I became accustomed to: a bizarre, yet somehow so dull existence wrought with isolation, and when the isolation ran up, public scorn would be my status quo.

And especially as Nessa grew older, and more beautiful and more complicated, I found myself apart from her, and apart from everyone else, inevitably. Mutuality was a notion I'd only read about. Camaraderie—even in commiseration—seemed unearthly.

So when I ventured outside into this whole new world of bright ingenuity and innumerable possibilities—Shiz—and I found the Animal population and discovered their plight, I absorbed it as my calling. I thought it was.

Really, it was just me.

The Animals were underdogs. They were ostracized. They were mistreated. They were misunderstood. They needed an advocate, and they'd never had one before.

They epitomized me.

I told myself I was fighting for a cause so very universal, when in reality I was fighting for myself. Injustice is wrong, of course, and I'd love to eliminate it, but I only identified with the Animals because they reminded me so much of the insecurities that I, as a young, gangly university student, always tried to repress.

I think that perhaps, subconsciously, I felt the need to go public with the issue of the Animals to assuage my own hurt. I'd never had an opportunity to be recognized before, I'd never made good; I never had the chance to be _accepted_.

I just wanted my plight to gather some attention.

I just wanted _acceptance_.

But clearly it was about me, and it wasn't until I witnessed Dr. Dillamond in that…state that I realized how incredibly selfish I am.

**004. **

It was never right for me to love him.

I remember our collision in the palace all too well—Glinda, Fiyero, and I. I remember it as an out-of-body experience; it'd been so long since the schism between the reportedly good and the reportedly wicked that my vision of my old schoolmates had been frozen in time. I still pictured Glinda as a bouncing, bubbling, effervescent figure, unable to sit still, unable to keep quiet, always giggling and dazzling and never tentative or cautious because the multitude's adulation had never wavered and never would. I pictured her as a schoolgirl, constantly learning and growing, a girl whose true heart of gold was unfortunately coated in a meretricious layer of bright pink plastic—always attractive, always guarded. Never real, but still so hopeful. I remember hoping, over some of the harder days in my insurgency, that the time had an effect on Glinda that caused that extraneous plastic layer to crack and fall away.

But instead I found my friend's heart only further coated in artificiality, and by that point it was hard as granite, and growing thicker by the day. She was beautiful as ever, but her young vitality had been replaced by a divine elegance, an image of perfection that I knew I could never match.

Especially in regards to Fiyero.

Fiyero.

Fiyero had changed, too.

He'd always been amazingly and infuriatingly and beautifully malleable; he'd been willing to fit into whatever tight spot was available, sift through closed doors and windows and dance his way in and out of hearts. He, by that point, had been molded into Glinda the Good's flawless counterpart; he was perfect for her and she was perfect for him, and though it wasn't true, it made _sense._ It was a truth that everyone agreed on. It was congenial. It worked. And doesn't that dynamic have some sort of rectitude to it?

My fervor for him, though, was thoroughly intoxicating; it dulled all my senses and left me powerless in a way that only he had the influence to make the all-too independent me resigned to. It was an indescribable passion, an all-consuming fire. It was mutual and that was fact. The two of us were unexpected, and not at all aesthetically pleasing, but we were so _real_. We were inevitable.

So of course, he was right. It "wasn't like that" at Shiz, I claimed to Glinda, but yet it was. It definitely was.

But it was so _wrong. _It was an abomination. It had always been wrong. He was perfect with Glinda, and wrong for me. There was no future for us, ever. I was wrong. I am, in and of myself, _wrong. _

I was a fool to think that my momentary vulnerability, my desperate, deplorable weakness, my _stupid_ hormonal delusion was conductive to any kind of success, or redolent of any kind of rectitude.

I love him.

Of course I love him. But what's so right about love?

Love between a prince and a perpetually ugly little frog can only end in disaster.

I love him, of course, but it was never right for me to love him, and now he's going to die.

**005. **

They call me wicked, and for the first time I'm starting to agree.

I was never righteous. My accumulation of calamities—the ugly road I have paved—has marred any possible trace of rectitude I could have left behind in my rash and bewildered endeavors. I didn't save my sister. I didn't save my cause.

Fiyero is going to die.

They call me wicked, and I don't even care anymore.

Rectitude, however noble, is a sorry pursuit.

Because it's not achievable—I don't even know that it's totally_ conceivable_—all we can really do is _try_, and trying was all that made me good. It was good of me—intelligent of me—to never stop trying. To never stop _striving _for integrity.

Now I've accepted my new creed, but with it, I've stopped trying. I've stopped caring. I've stopped fighting. I've been weak enough to let myself be enveloped by an epidemic of conformity. My buried desire for personal acceptance has been pulverized and left neglected in favor of a passive acceptance of injustice that embodies all I've attempted to stand against.

And that may be the greatest wickedness of all.


End file.
